A Jew of Alexandria
Philo lived in Alexandria, the great Greek-speaking city on the Egyptian coast, at the height of the Roman Empire. Founded by Alexander the Great, it was a centre of trade and learning, home to the famous Library and to one of the largest Jewish communities of the ancient world. Philo himself claimed that the Jews of Egypt numbered no fewer than a million, and that they lived mainly in two of Alexandria’s five districts. Jews had been there for centuries; it was in Alexandria that the Hebrew Bible had been translated into Greek, the version known as the Septuagint, which was Philo’s Bible.
His dates are known only approximately. He described himself as an old man at the time of his embassy to Rome around 40 CE, and he refers to events under the emperor Claudius, so scholars place his birth around 20 to 10 BCE and his death around 45 to 50 CE. He was a contemporary of Jesus and of Paul, though he never mentions either. The Greeks called him Philon; later Jewish writers sometimes gave him the Hebrew name Yedidyah.
A family of wealth and power
Philo came from one of the richest and most prominent Jewish families in the Roman world. His father or grandfather had received Roman citizenship, probably from Julius Caesar. His brother, Alexander, held the post of alabarch, a senior customs official, and was said to be the wealthiest man in the city. Alexander lent money to the Judean king Agrippa I and paid for gold and silver plating on gates of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Christian scholar Jerome later wrote that Philo came from a priestly family, though this cannot be confirmed.
The family’s story shows the pressures on Jews in the Greco-Roman world. One of Philo’s nephews, Marcus Julius Alexander, married the Judean princess Berenice. Another, Tiberius Julius Alexander, rose to be governor of Judea and prefect of Egypt; Josephus says he did not remain true to his ancestral customs, and as a Roman commander he took part in the siege of Jerusalem. Philo, by contrast, remained a committed and observant Jew all his life, and he records at least one pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem to pray and offer sacrifice.
Greek learning, Jewish loyalty
Philo received a thorough Greek education, in grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, music and philosophy, and he wrote in elegant Greek. He knew the poets Homer and Euripides and the orator Demosthenes, and above all he loved Plato, whose dialogues Timaeus and Phaedrus shaped his thought, as did the ethics of the Stoics. How much Hebrew he knew is debated; he read Scripture mainly in the Greek translation and believed it to be as inspired as the original.
For Philo there was no conflict between his two worlds. He believed that Moses was the greatest of philosophers, and that the truths the Greeks had discovered were already present, more perfectly, in the Torah. His life’s work was to show educated readers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, that the laws and stories of the Bible were not primitive tales but a profound teaching about God, the universe and the good life.
Reading Moses with Plato
Philo’s chief tool was allegory, a method of interpretation the Greeks had used on Homer. Beneath the literal story, he argued, lay a deeper meaning about the soul. Adam stands for the mind and Eve for the senses; Abraham’s journey from Ur is the soul’s migration from material things toward God. The patriarchs become models of virtues that every reader can strive for. His many treatises work through Genesis and Exodus verse by verse, in commentaries, question-and-answer books and expositions of the law.
Yet Philo did not use allegory to dissolve Jewish practice. He explicitly criticised Jews who said that because the commandments have symbolic meanings, they need not be observed. Circumcision, the Sabbath and the festivals carried deeper meanings, he wrote, but they were still to be kept. This balance of reason and observance, of universal wisdom and particular law, was his great experiment.
One God and the Logos
Philo’s God is utterly transcendent: one, unchanging, without body or human passions, beyond any name or description. Where the Bible speaks of God’s hand or anger, Philo read it as a teaching device adapted to human understanding. To explain how such a God could create and govern the world, he spoke of divine powers, chief among them the Logos, the divine Word or Reason, through which God fashioned the universe and which binds it together. He compared it to an architect’s plan for a city, existing before the city is built.
This was the first sustained attempt to explain the faith of the Hebrew Bible in the language of Greek philosophy, and it had enormous consequences. The historian of philosophy Harry Austryn Wolfson argued that Philo founded a new kind of religious philosophy, in which revelation and reason are brought into harmony, a project later taken up in their own ways by Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers through the Middle Ages.
The law as a teacher of humanity
Philo presented the laws of Moses as a guide to justice and compassion. In On the Special Laws he argued that the biblical law against causing a miscarriage implied a ban on exposing newborn infants, a practice common in the Greco-Roman world, and he denounced infanticide in the strongest terms as murder. In On the Virtues he stressed the law’s care for the vulnerable, including its command to love the stranger, which he interpreted as a duty to welcome newcomers who joined the Jewish people as one would love oneself.
He also wrote admiringly of Jewish communities devoted to the contemplative and ethical life. In Every Good Man Is Free he described the Essenes, and in On the Contemplative Life, a work most scholars accept as his, he portrayed the Therapeutae, a community of men and women near Lake Mareotis who devoted themselves to study and prayer. These accounts are among our few ancient descriptions of such groups.
Violence in Alexandria and an embassy to Rome
In 38 CE Alexandria’s Jews suffered one of the first recorded pogroms. Under the Roman prefect Aulus Avilius Flaccus, mobs set up images of the emperor Caligula in synagogues, Flaccus declared the Jews foreigners in their own city, and Jews were driven out of most of Alexandria into a crowded corner of it, while homes and shops were looted and many people were killed. Philo described these events in his treatise Against Flaccus, an invaluable eyewitness source for the history of antisemitic violence.
When the crisis continued, the Jewish community chose Philo, by then an elderly man, to lead an embassy to the emperor Gaius Caligula in 39 or 40 CE to defend their rights. Rival delegations from the Greeks of Alexandria included the writer Apion, who accused the Jews of refusing to honour the emperor as a god. Josephus reports that Caligula would not hear Philo’s defence and dismissed him angrily, and that Philo told his companions to take courage, for the emperor had set God against himself. In his own account, The Embassy to Gaius, Philo describes the humiliating audiences and the terrible news, received while the delegation waited, that Caligula had ordered his statue set up in the Temple in Jerusalem. Caligula was assassinated in 41 CE before the order was carried out. His successor Claudius reaffirmed the right of Alexandria’s Jews to live by their own customs, while ordering both communities to keep the peace.
Saved by others
Remarkably, Philo’s works survived not through the Jewish tradition but through the Christian church. Early Christian scholars in Alexandria, especially Clement and Origen, found in his allegorical method and his idea of the Logos a model for reading Scripture philosophically, and his books were copied in Christian libraries. The church historian Eusebius cited him at length; Jerome even listed him among church writers. Some of his works survive only in ancient Armenian or Latin translations. About fifty treatises remain, and some twenty or more are known to have been lost.
Within Judaism, by contrast, he was largely forgotten for some fifteen centuries. The rabbis who shaped later Jewish tradition wrote in Hebrew and Aramaic and did not cite him. Only in 1575 did the Italian Jewish scholar Azariah dei Rossi discuss him at length, praising his learning while criticising his reliance on the Greek Bible and some of his philosophical views. In modern times Jewish scholars have reclaimed him as a major figure of Jewish thought.
Legacy
Philo stands at a crossroads of civilisations. He was the first thinker known to us who set out systematically to reconcile the Bible with philosophy, and his writings are the richest surviving witness to the life of Greek-speaking Jews in the ancient world. Historians of early Christianity read him to understand the intellectual world in which the New Testament was written, and historians of the Jews read his eyewitness accounts of the Alexandrian pogrom and the embassy to Caligula as some of the most vivid evidence for Jewish life under Roman rule.
He preserved, explained and defended his tradition at a moment when it was under pressure, both from violence and from the allure of a dominant culture. He spoke for his community before an emperor, and he taught that the God of Israel calls human beings to wisdom, justice and kindness toward the stranger and the helpless. Two thousand years later, every attempt to show that faith and reason can speak to each other walks a path that Philo of Alexandria was the first to map.
Sources & further reading
Philo, Wikipedia · Philo of Alexandria, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Philo, On the Virtues, C. D. Yonge translation (Perseids) · Philo, On the Special Laws III.101–120, C. D. Yonge translation (Perseids) · Alexandrian riots (38 CE), Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.